Handwritten letters from school children in the United Kingdom.
A poster-sized pencil etching from the Soviet Union depicting Christa McAuliffe being named Teacher in Space, teaching in the classroom, putting on her space helmet.
Condolence cards drawn in marker and crayon from an elementary school in Florida.
A postcard from India. Plates. Plaques. Lace pillows. Scrolls. Banners.
In the aftermath of the Challenger tragedy, Concord High School received a material outpouring of support in droves from across the world. Now, these artifacts reside in the archives of the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center and are being methodically cataloged for research purposes.
Archivist Amber Woods said she thinks all 50 states have items represented in the mix, as well as numerous countries, including Mexico, Canada, England, India and more.
“All of these pieces show that it doesn’t matter where we were politically,” she said. “Even when we’re considering the space race, how we were competitors, everyone around the world just forgot about all the competing narratives, and we just focused on the loss of the first teacher in space and the program in itself, and how impactful Christa was, which I think is very beautiful.”
Some of these items will be on display at the Discovery Center’s new Christa McAuliffe exhibit, slated to open on Wednesday, Jan. 28. As the exhibit prepares for its unveiling, work at the archives continues, since there are many more artifacts to sort through and catalog both physically and digitally.
“We just want to be a resource to anybody in the community that wants to do any research on their own, if they’re writing a paper, a book … or just their own personal interest,” Woods said.
When the Christa McAuliffe Planetarium — now part of the Discovery Center — opened in 1990, Concord High transferred to its possession all the items people had mailed from across the world.
Woods described how staggering it’s been to see the scope of the international mourning following Challenger.
“Even if they didn’t know Christa, weren’t in the state, didn’t have a teacher, they still felt the need to write in and talk about how impactful she was,” she said.
Having spent countless hours sorting through the archives, Woods sees the scope of the grief people expressed both for Christa and in expressions of empathy for her family. No matter where people were sending letters from, they conveyed their condolences at the loss of the Challenger crew. Beyond that, however, Woods has noticed a cultural difference.
“Americans, I feel like we just focused on how we can better the space program. Is the Teacher in Space going to continue? But the rest of the world focused on the disaster more than anything,” she said.
She wonders sometimes about the people who wrote letters and ponders ways to connect with them in the future.
“That is also something I would be very interested in as we go forward, making these available online, it’d be so nice if we could eventually see if people remember, if they wrote a letter, let us know, ‘hey, that was me. I wrote that letter,'” she said.
The new exhibit will serve as a launchpad for the first-ever public access to these items.
“We’ll be adding new things as time goes on, but it’ll be a starting point for people to start looking and see what we have, and let people know we have this trove of Christa’s legacy,” Woods said.
